Three Aspects of Culture

READING/LISTENING

Exercise 1. Read and listen to Part 2 of the series about culture using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/tae_whoonearth_archive.shtml

Part I

Culture is a very difficult thing to define and if you ask yourself the question ' What is culture?' and try to come up with a definition you'll find that all of us will come up with a slightly different type of definition. One very broad definition suggests that culture consists of ideals, values and assumptions about life that are widely shared among people and that guide specific behaviours.

Quite a practical way of looking at culture is to divide it into three groups: products, behaviours and ideas and in the first group - products - all those things that a culture produces - its architecture and its food, its music and folklore and literature - those are the visible products of a culture.

In the second group we'd find behaviours - that's either verbal behaviours - language - or non-verbal behaviours such as gesture and communication. Also habits, routines, social etiquette, all of these things would come under the heading of behaviour.

In the third group we'd find ideas or our world view and all the things that go to make up our world view. So in this group we'd be thinking about things like our attitudes and our beliefs and the way that we organize such things as our societies - what are the relationships and roles within our societies - between men and women for example.

We could get a good idea of what a culture is like by looking at the things that people produce, the way they behave, and the way they see the world.

Part II

But perhaps a better definition of what a culture is was first devised more than forty years ago by the North American anthropologist Edward T Hall. He was one of the founding fathers of the field of intercultural communication and his definition suggests that culture is the sum total of the way of life of a people. He also gave a very good reason for why we find it so difficult to say what culture is. It’s because the culture we grow up in seems so normal that we don’t even notice it’s there.

So the rules of the culture that we're born into are invisible to us, we can't see them - we can't see the norms, we can't see the assumptions, we can't see the behaviour patterns - all of the patterns within our society are invisible to us. In fact our behaviour is controlled by culture so we're not free really - we're actually acting in a way that is patterned and we acquire all the rules of the culture almost without knowing it.

Even in a culture that seemed quite similar you might find that there are some quite different patterns operating within that society that made the culture quite different underneath.

Learning another culture would be like having to learn the second language in school, it would be conscious you'd have to think about the rules, you'd have to ask yourself questions about the attitudes and the beliefs.

Studying culture, learning the grammar, is not a simple process. Culture is not one big ‘monolithic’ thing, where people are all the same, all ‘homogenous’. And that, of course, is one of the great reasons why culture is so difficult to define.

Exercise 2. Are the following statements are true or false? Correct the false ones.

1. Culture consists of ideas, values and assumptions about life that guide specific behaviours.

2. Culture can be divided into three groups: products, ideas and behaviours.

3. Language, gesture and communication are the visible products of a culture.

4. Habits, routines, social etiquette could come under the heading of behaviour.

5. In the third group there are things that make up our world view.

6. A North American anthropologist defined the word “culture” forty years ago.

7. We are not free because our behaviour is controlled by our culture.

Exercise 3. Read the text again and write down the key words and phrases to summarise the following points:

1. The first aspect of culture.

2. The second aspect of culture.

3. The third aspect of culture.